There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post over the weekend, comparing CIA warnings about the Iraqi threat with White House interpretations of that information. The article was one of the most hard-hitting reports I’ve seen in recent weeks and, for reasons that escape me, the Post decided to run the piece on page A17 in Saturday’s paper, the least read addition of the week.
In other words, a lot of people were likely to miss this one, but it deserves more attention that the Post editors seemed to believe.
The Post’s Walter Pincus and Dana Priest explained that the White House relied heavily on the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was released in October 2002 to make its case for the invasion, but Bush and his top aides “ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report” and made some of their most sweeping conclusions about the Iraqi threat before the document was even finished.
Point by point, the article shows that the administration repeatedly exaggerated information to which the NIE pointed and/or drew conclusions that the intelligence community had clearly not made on their own. Consider:
Now that extended efforts to find weapons of mass destruction have proved futile, some are asking why Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld used unequivocal rhetoric to describe the threat from Iraq when the intelligence on the subject was much more nuanced and subjective.
For example, when Bush on Sept. 24, 2002, repeated the British claim that Iraq’s chemical weapons could be activated within 45 minutes, he ignored the fact that U.S. intelligence mistrusted the source and that the claim never appeared in the October 2002 U.S. estimate.
On Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said: “Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” The estimate, several weeks later, would say it would take as many as five years, unless Baghdad immediately obtained weapons-grade materials.
In the same speech, Cheney raised the specter that Hussein would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, a prospect invoked often in the weeks to come. “Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined,” Cheney said.
It would be more than a month later that a declassified portion of the NIE would show that U.S. intelligence analysts had forecast that Hussein would give such weapons to terrorists only if Iraq were invaded and he faced annihilation.
“The probability of him initiating an attack . . . in the foreseeable future . . . I think would be low,” a senior CIA official told the Senate intelligence committee during a classified briefing on the estimate on Oct. 2, 2002. The CIA released a partial transcript five days later after committee Democrats complained that a published “white paper” on Iraq’s weapons had not given the public a fair reading of what the classified NIE contained.
On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney said of Hussein on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” Cheney was referring to the aluminum tubes that some analysts believed could be used for a centrifuge to help make nuclear materials; others believed they were for an antiaircraft rocket.
Such absolute certainty, however, did not appear in the estimate. Tenet said Thursday that the controversy has yet to be cleared up.
On Sept. 19, 2002, Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.” The October estimate contained no similar language.
Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld described an immediate threat from biological weapons. Hussein, he said, could deploy “sleeper cells armed with biological weapons to attack us from within — and then deny any knowledge or connection to the attacks.”
While the intelligence community believed Hussein had biological agents such as anthrax, and that they could be quickly produced and weaponized for delivery by bombs, missiles or aerial sprayers, the October 2002 estimate said: “We had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agents, or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.”
Tenet’s “provisional bottom line” on biological weapons, he said Thursday, is that research and development efforts were underway in Iraq “that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were available. But we do not know if production took place — and just as clearly — we have not yet found biological weapons.”